From the time the Pilgrims arrived on American soil, faith in God played an important part in shaping our nation. Images of Moses adorn the Supreme Court in recognition of the Judeo-Christian origin of our laws. But it was Taxes, loss of Liberty and oppression from a mad king that led our Founding Fathers to write The Declaration of Independence and start The American Revolution. Today, those who stand for these ideals no longer call themselves The Silent Majority because we are silent no more.

I’ve no idea where President Barack Obama gets his shirts and smokes,
but he certainly talks like a highbrow, sufficiently so to persuade
presidential historian Michael Beschloss to pronounce him the day after
the 2008 election “the smartest president ever.” Yet, in the end, he
plays Chicago style. You can take the community organizer out of
Chicago, but you can’t take the Chicago out of the community organizer.
Or as the Agence France-Presse headline put it, “Combative Obama Warns
Supreme Court On Health Law.”

Headlines in which the executive “warns” the courts are usually the
province of places like Balochistan, where powerful Cabinet ministers
are currently fuming at the Chief Justice’s determination to stop them
kidnapping citizens and holding them for ransom – literally, that is,
not merely figuratively, as in America. But, here as there, when Obama
“warns” the Supreme Court “over health law,” it’s their health prospects
he has in mind. He cautioned the justices – “an unelected group of
people” – not to take the “unprecedented, extraordinary step of
overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a
democratically elected Congress.”

The eunuchs of the palace media gleefully piled on:
as the New York Times sees it, were the justices to take an
“unprecedented” step so unprecedented there are two centuries’ worth of
precedents going back to 1803, they would be fatally damaging “the
Court’s legitimacy.”

All that’s unprecedented here is the spectacle of the president of
the United States, while the judges are deliberating, idly swinging his
tire iron and saying,

“Nice little Supreme Court you got here. Shame if anything were to happen to it.”

A nation can have formal “checks and balances,” but in the end free
societies depend on a certain deference to the proprieties. If you’re
willing to disdain those, you can drive a coach and horses through
accepted norms very easily. The bit about “a democratically elected
Congress” was an especially exquisite touch given Obama’s recently
professed respect for the democratic process: as he assured Vladimir
Putin’s sock puppet the other day, he’ll have “more flexibility” to
accommodate foreign interests after he’s got his “last election” and all
that tedious democracy business out of the way. His ”last election,” I hasten to add, not America’s.

Aside from his contempt for judicial review and those rube voters,
what other checks and balances doesn’t he have time for? Well, he makes
“recess appointments” when the Senate isn’t in recess, thus
circumventing the dreary business of confirmation by that
“democratically elected” legislature he likes so much. But, hey, it’s
only members of the National Labor Relations Board and the director of
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, so why get hung up on
constitutional niceties?

By the way, have you heard of this Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau? No? Don’t worry, no big deal, it’s just a new federal agency.
Because we can always use another of those, right? What’s one more
acronym jostling in the ever more crowded alphabet soup of federal
regulation? CFTC, CPSC, CNPP and now CFPB. Not to be confused with
CFPB-FM, the Inuit radio station just south of the Arctic Circle in the
Nunavut village of Kugaaruk, where in 1975 the world’s all-time coldest
wind chill was recorded: minus 135 degrees Fahrenheit.

Where was I? Oh, yes: the world’s all-time coldest wind chill. That’s
what you’re going to be feeling at this point in an Obama second term.
If you like his contempt for judicial review, parliamentary scrutiny and
representative democracy now, wait’ll you see how “flexible” he’ll get
starting in January 2013. The CFPB appointment is not a small thing.
Indeed, its new director, one Richard Cordray, embodies what’s gone so
disastrously wrong with American government: you’ll have to be in
compliance with him, but he doesn’t have to be in compliance with
anybody, whether the Senate or the Constitution. As I say somewhere in
my recent book, you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a
bureaucracy-for-life. More and more aspects of the citizen’s daily
existence are regulated by rules and officials both of which are ever
more disconnected from any meaningful accountability to the people’s
representatives. As the president says, look for even more “flexibility”
in a second term: more non-recess recess appointments, more executive
orders, more bewildering innovations from the commissars of the
hyper-regulatory state.

Which brings us to another aspect of government that Obama apparently
finds a frightful bore: budgets. In free societies, the executive is
subject to the creative tensions of popular restraint, legislative
restraint, judicial restraint and fiscal restraint. All these the
president has artfully sidestepped. In the past three years, the United
States has ceased to have any meaningful budgeting at the national
level, with the consequence that Washington piles on roughly a trillion
dollars of new debt every seven or eight months. This week, before the
fawning toadies at the Associated Press luncheon, Obama attacked
Congressman Paul Ryan’s plan to prevent America plunging into the debt
abyss and at least keep its fingernails clawing at the clumps on the
cliff edge for a couple more decades. Don’t believe him, sneered the
president. “Hundreds of national parks” will close. Parts of the country
will see “complete elimination of air traffic control.” We will be
unable to “combat violent crime.” Two million mothers and young children
will wind up without “access to healthy food”. Anything else? You bet.
The Ryan plan will doom everything everywhere – “the air we breathe, the
water we drink, the food that we eat.”

“This is not conjecture,” said the president. “These are facts.”

Speaking of facts, in the past year the federal government has added
the equivalent of the GDP of Canada in new debt. Who’s buying it? The
Chinese? Not so much. They’ve got pretty much all the Washington IOU’s
they need. Sixty-one percent of debt issued by the Treasury is bought by
the Federal Reserve – which is to say the left hand of the U.S.
Government is lending money to the right hand of the US Government.
That’s one reason the dollar is in steep decline against every major
currency. Indeed, had it not been for the French and Germans et al
inaugurating the new century by inventing a currency for an artificial
jurisdiction with even less connection to economic reality (the European
Union), it’s likely that the markets would have yanked the rug out from
under the dollar by now.

Nonetheless, in a land where every mewling babe in the American
nursery is born with a debt burden of just under $200,000, the president
brags that only his party is “compassionate” to have no plan whatsoever
even to attempt to do anything about this, no way, no how, not now, not
ever.
Last week, the head of the General Services Administration, the
federal agency that picks out the office furniture for the other federal
agencies, had to resign after a bureaucrats’ junket to Vegas that
included a lavish party with clowns and a $3,200 mind reader. The clowns
seem surplus to requirements, but I’d love to know what that mind
reader found.

Obama-sized government ends nowhere good, and in his
Chicago-style contempt for checks and balances he’s telling us that, if
you enjoyed the first term, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Blogroll

About Me

My name is Nelson Abdullah. I am 77-years old and after 40 years of working for two major airlines, I retired 15 years ago in 2002, a few months after the 9-11 attack on America. My wife and I have been married for more than 56 years. We celebrated our Golden Anniversary in April 2010.
My wife and I are both lifelong Catholics and registered Republicans.

About this blog

Defending the Constitution.

Our country was created as a Constitutional Republic, a nation of laws, held together by the fabric of the Constitution. The Constitution limits the powers of the government while the first ten amendments, called The Bill of Rights, guarantee the rights of We The People.Defending the Republic.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” —The Declaration of Independence—July 4th, 1776.

Bill of Rights

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.